


The Pinewood Church

by thedevilchicken



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Cults, Forests, Horror, M/M, Object Insertion, Old Gods, Public Sex, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Trees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:21:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26367106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Alex doesn't like the woods, but he knows Nathaniel will look after him.
Relationships: Backwoods Cult Leader/Young Man Seeking Protection, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 4
Kudos: 75
Collections: We die afen and afen





	The Pinewood Church

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StormyDaze](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormyDaze/gifts).



He doesn't like the woods. 

They smell like a parking lot full of Christmas trees and he keeps getting mud on his boots when he decides to leave his cabin and everything's just way too quiet all the time - it's like every teenage horror flick he's ever seen all crammed right into one big creepy cliché, and he doesn't like it. But he can't go home, because home isn't home since his dad kicked him out, seventeen years old, and maybe he doesn't like the woods but where else can he go?

Besides, Nathaniel will look after him. 

\- 

He'd heard whispers about the place for weeks before he went there. It seemed like everyone had heard of it but none of them had been there, and Alex wasn't sure if that meant it was more like legend than location, but compared with the shelters and a night sometimes, here and there, shivering under the sleeping bag he'd stolen from some drunk guy heading home from a tent in a field at a festival Alex knew he'd never get to go to, it seemed like a great and shining option. 

It was outside the city, they said, a place in the woods, down a dirt track behind a tall fence to keep prying eyes off private property. They'd take new people in, they said - they all knew someone, different names, always different names, who'd gone there and found a place with the church, because why else wouldn't they come back? Nathaniel Bright maybe wasn't quite the son of God but people said he said good things. And Alex, well, he'd always liked church, at least when his father wasn't preaching. 

It was outside the city, so far away that he couldn't walk there all the way. He begged sometimes, and he stole sometimes, and he told himself once he was at the Pinewood Church he wouldn't need to steal again. He bought a ticket for the bus and washed up in the station bathroom so that maybe when he got there Nathaniel wouldn't take one look and tell him he should leave. When he got there, they didn't tell him to leave; three men in simple dress let him in through the gate and took him up the path toward the church. He thought, for once, that he'd done the right thing. 

There's no actual church at the Pinewood Church. There are fourteen cabins and a larger hall that sits between them, a well and garden and a livestock field or two. There's no power, no phone, no Facebook, no nothing - all there is is smiling faces, and Nathaniel Bright. 

They showed him to a cabin. A girl brought him hot water and some clothes so he could wash and change and he was grateful - it seemed like they made their own soap, too, though he couldn't say what from, and he scrubbed himself from head to toe to get the four hours on a bus off of his skin, and everything that there was underneath. He hadn't felt clean in four months, and he figured it might take a few more scrubs to make him feel that way again. 

He ate dinner with them in the hall, all twenty-three of them, plus Nathaniel. He's tall and slim and blond, or at least he was, and when he smiled and said, "Come sit by me," Alex felt like maybe he'd done something right. They talked. Nathaniel said they'd give it a few days, like a trial, just to see if he'd fit in, and that seemed fair. And, when he went to bed that night, with an oil lamp burning steadily next to his bed, he didn't even really see the shadows that crept underneath the door. 

In the day, Alex worked in the garden. He'd helped out on his father's church allotment sometimes, weeding, planting things, helping the little kids, and it was kind of just like that but on a larger, harder scale. He didn't mind the work. It made his back ache, and his hands felt sore until Nathaniel came by, and smiled, and gave him a pair of gloves to wear that fit like they'd been made for him. They broke for lunch, and washed up before dinner, and afterwards they sat around the fire outside and Nathaniel told stories. He told stories about the woods that they were sitting in, on the thick old logs carved flat like benches while the flames licked sparks into the sky. There were old things there, he said, things as old as the night was. And when he smiled, he looked at Alex; Alex lit up like the fire inside. 

When three days were up, Nathaniel put both his hands on both Alex's shoulders and asked him if he'd like to stay with them there in the woods. He seemed almost a little taller then, and a little more gaunt, but when he smiled he was so handsome that Alex's chest hurt. He said yes. Of course he did. 

The nights started getting colder after that, and the dawn started breaking later, and after dark when he went to bed, Alex could hear the woods outside the cabin where he slept. There were things out there, he thought, like Nathaniel said: old things, nature, what they would all go back to and sprung out of. At the fireside, it sounded good, and it sounded warm, but underneath his blanket all he could think was how the earth would feel as it took him back. He closed his eyes, so he wouldn't see the shadows anymore, and wrapped his hand around his cock; when he came, it was Nathaniel he was thinking of, and Nathaniel's smile, not the tangled trees around the Pinewood Church. 

A week passed. A month passed. Days turned short and nights turned long, though he found they didn't keep a calendar, or clocks, or any kind of time. Twenty-three faces smiled at him at breakfast, and then Nathaniel would smile, too. Twenty-three smiled and said good night. And then, sometime in the second month, or maybe the third, Nathaniel asked him to stay by the fire. When he stood, he seemed thinner, and that made him seem even taller. The firelight glowed in his eyes. 

"You seem...unfulfilled," Nathaniel said, with a furrow in between his brows. "Are you sure you want to stay?"

Alex felt his chest clench tight. He nodded. He panicked. "I'm sure," he said. "Don't make me go." 

"I won't." His hands squeezed at Alex's shoulders, so tight them almost hurt. "I'd like to help." 

"I'd like that, too."

When Nathaniel smiled, he could have asked him for anything that he could give. He could have asked for everything. 

What he asked for was so much less than that. Not very much at all. 

-

The first night, Nathaniel washed him. He had Alex lead him back into his cabin and then take off his clothes, and then he washed him, slowly, head to toe. The lamplight flickered, or it seemed to; it made Nathaniel's hands seem long, and thin, and dark. 

The second night, Nathaniel washed him, too. They went to Alex's cabin from the fireside and Nathaniel took off his clothes; "Close your eyes," Nathaniel said, and so he did, and when his balance faltered, Nathaniel's big hands on his bare hips kept him upright. He shivered, all goosebumps right from head to toe. 

The third night, Nathaniel's fingers traced his cleft and made him clench his jaw. The fourth night, they traced his cock and made him stiffen shamefully and turn away. The fifth night, when Nathaniel knelt in front of him, when his cock went stiff, he bit his lip. But Nathaniel said, "That's good, Alex. Don't hide from me." So he didn't hide, just like he was told.

The sixth night, Nathaniel bent him over the cabin's small desk; his fingers teased between his cheeks and Alex's cock strained. 

"Please..." he said, though he wasn't sure what he was asking for. Nathaniel knew; he sucked on his own fingers, wetly, then pushed one inside. Forty seconds later, Alex came, because he really couldn't stop himself. 

Seven nights. Eight. Nathaniel's thin fingers pressed inside him, deeply, sending shivers down his spine. Nine nights. Ten. Nathaniel's whole hand breached him, slowly, and his hole pulled tight around his wrist. Eleven nights. Fourteen. In the days, he daydreamed of the nights to come, and in the nights he knelt there on his bed and felt the things Nathaniel did. His cheeks burned bright as he pushed a wooden rod inside, contoured, thick, and slick with oil. He bit his lip till it was raw as Nathaniel's fingers, almost as hard, pushed deeper, _deeper_ , till it almost hurt. When he came, there were tears in his eyes, but from gratitude and not from pain. 

He doesn't know how long it's been now, and he's honestly not sure he cares. Each day, he smiles like all the others as he tends the garden, and he waits for night to fall. Today, night has fallen, and they all sit by the fire that never seems to fade and through the flames, Nathaniel seems almost as tall as the tangled pines surrounding them. He beckons to him, with his fingers long and thin as roots, and so Alex stands and goes to him. The others watch.

"Take off your clothes," Nathaniel says, and so he does, ignoring all their smiles; he takes off the shawl he wears against the chill and the simple tunic underneath, and the pants that seem a size or two too small now since he's been here so they're held up with a braided belt - it's almost as if the thinner that he gets, the taller that Nathaniel grows, but that's absurd. 

He shivers when he's naked but the fire's close enough to keep him warm, and then Nathaniel has him go down on his hands and knees. There are pine needles littering the ground but Alex's palms are tough from work and so he doesn't feel them. What he feels is Nathaniel's fingers on his skin, against his back, parting his cheeks. He feels his cock against his hole, gnarled like wood as he pushes inside. He's so big, stretching Alex's tight hole out wider than he thinks it should, and he's so deep, _so deep_ , like he might burst out through his skin in a hundred gory pine branches. And all Alex can do is groan as fingers wrap around his cock. He calls them fingers. He wonders if they're not.

When he comes, he can see twenty-three placid-smiling faces watching. When Nathaniel comes, when his fingers twist into Alex's dark hair and pull till his back bows between hand in hair and cock in ass, Alex finds he doesn't mind. 

When he looks back at Nathaniel, towering and great, he's not scared at all. He smiles. 

-

Once, he didn't like the woods. He thought they smelled weird, and the mud seemed to get everywhere, and the shadows crawling underneath his door at night like tree roots in the ground weren't something that he understood. 

He goes to his cabin. He closes his cabin door. And, in bed, when the shadows come in through the cracks, Nathaniel's there; Nathaniel will look after him.

Once, Alex didn't like the woods. There are old things there, old as sky and earth and night, that wait. 

He didn't like the woods. Now, he can't imagine leaving them.


End file.
